I remember that winter as if it were now. I was 11. No one knew, except me, that overnight my body had turned into a bleeding wound.
No one told me it was normal, that that blood was not shameful. That it was the beginning of a world, not my end. That I didn’t have to hide. That I was not unclean.
“Unclean!”
It was Christmas Eve and, like every year, the children in the neighborhood went to church to sing carols and receive gifts: a shoe-box wrapped in the most beautiful paper in the world, filled with secret treasures. I put on my “good” burgundy velvet dress.
I called my best friend so we could go together. I heard her whisper through clenched teeth that she couldn’t go because she was in “that” time of the month and wasn’t allowed.
“What???,” I stared. “You’re not allowed to go to church because you’re on your period???”
I heard her mumbling words that made no sense to me: that she would be unclean, that God this and that, that it’s written in the Holy Book. I understood nothing.
Her news didn’t stop me. I walked out the door, dazed, with my younger brothers and sisters. But now my mind knew I couldn’t go inside the church with the other children, couldn’t sing carols, couldn’t receive that gift which, to me, was the most important present of the year. No one knew about my “uncleanness,” but I couldn’t lie to God.
I stood on the church steps, in the frost, watching others receive gifts and blessings while I held my thighs tightly together and kept my eyes on the ground. I said nothing. I just learned another lesson about what it means to be a woman: not being allowed. Standing outside, watching others receive what I longed for more than anything.
I wasn’t crying, but something inside me was tearing silently, like old butcher paper. Inside, the choir sang about wonderful things and I wanted to scream that there was nothing wonderful about being a girl and being pushed out of the light. I felt guilty for existing, for my body doing such a thing on Christmas Eve.
I didn’t understand then why the blood that gives life was considered shameful. Why men’s wounds are trophies, and mine, as a girl becoming a woman, were sins hidden under shame. Why, when suffering is born from female flesh, it must be silenced, concealed, quickly washed away with bowed head.
Not only then, but for years, I wondered what exactly in me had disturbed God so much that He would not receive me on His birthday. Which part of me was too dirty for the altar? My womb? My uterus? The blood inside me? The tearing pain in my belly?
If I hadn’t been so consumed by those questions back then, I might have seen that it wasn’t God who cast me out of the church that Christmas night. It wasn’t God who made me feel wrong in my own skin. It was people. Fear. Dogma. Shame inherited and passed down like a holy disease.
God, if He was there, wasn’t in the altar. He was on the cold steps beside me. Silent, with His large warm hand on the hunched back of a little girl no one saw. Maybe God saw me more clearly than ever that night and loved me even then, bleeding and invisible. Only people forget that a woman’s blood is the beginning of life.
And yet, I kept hiding for years, even from myself.
I learned that a woman must take care of herself “in silence,” carry her shame with dignity, wash her underwear in secret, remain spotless.
My body? I didn’t receive it. It was imposed on me.
And maybe there, in those years when I transformed without guidance, without tenderness, I began to believe I didn’t deserve to be inhabited with love. That I was a mistake that had to be constantly adjusted. That I had to be quiet, good, adaptable in order to be accepted. That was the moment I split from myself. When my body became something to endure, not something to love.
But no one saw. No one saw that under the ironed uniform, under the heavy backpack, there was a little girl who every morning put on not only her clothes, but an inherited shame, a longing for a touch that never came, and a silence the size of a cathedral.
Maybe if someone had asked me then what I felt, I would have gone even quieter.
Because I had already learned: the body is not to be spoken of.
It is to be hidden.
Controlled.
Judged.
Blamed.
And yet, now I know that is where my fight began. There, between sore nipples and whispers about “young ladies,” I became a mute woman with sharp teeth. A woman with a body that remembers. A woman who, after years and years of battles, will take her voice back, word by word, verse by verse.